Redmoon

Lawsuit

Chinese player Li Hongchen who had spent over $1,210 on pay-as-you-go cards to play, gathering weapons and items in this MMORPG had his game account looted by a cracker. He asked the company behind the game to identify the cracker, but they refused to give out players' details. Li took the case to court and demanded the amount he lost in compensation. "I exchanged the equipment with my labour, time, wisdom and money, and of course they are my belongings," it quoted him as saying of the virtual property he collected online. The company argued that the value of the virtual property only existed in the game and was "just piles of data to our operating companies."

On December 19, 2003, the court ruled that the company should restore his lost items, because loopholes in the server software made it easy to break in. It's an important case for future disputes over virtual properties.

Shutdown

Redmoon closed down permanently on September 1, 2004. This resulted from "because of database hacking issues" reported in May 2004 and then the server service was discontinued.